Restaurant Uses Heat From Volcano to Cook

The cooking grill for the El Diablo restaurant. Apparently, the hole gives off so much heat, it is immpossible to look directly into it. Photo courtesy: goforchris/CC BY-ND 2.0

Operating a restaurant on a volcano sounds like an insane thing to do, but that's what local notable architect Cesar Manrique has been doing with El Diablo, a restaurant that's been in business -- cooking food using volcanic heat -- since 1970.

Located in Timanfaya National Park, on Lanzarote, a Spanish island northwest of Morocco, the restaurant's main draw is its volcanic cooking, on a large grill that uses the heat of the volcano to cook meat and fish for its patrons. Thankfully, it's not the type of active volcano with lava flows oozing out; rather, it's dormant, but the smoldering heat from deep within the earth is still enough to cook food.



According to Oddity Central, the restaurant's customized grill was a bit of an architectural feat: in order to bypass the problem of not being able to build conventional foundations due to the heat underground, architects Eduardo Caceres and Jesus Soto used nine layers of volcanic basalt rock to make a suitable cooking pit.

The El Diablo restaurant serves Canarians food which is cooked using geothermal heat (a cast-iron grill placed over a large hole in the ground). Temperature just a few metres below the surface reach between 400 and 600 degrees. Photo courtesy: Sylviane Moss/CC BY-ND 2.0

It's an interesting attraction on this rocky island that was created volcanically millions of years ago, and had its last volcanic eruption in 1824. In addition to views of the island, a three-course meal and transportation to and from one's hotel, the restaurant offers a tour of the cooking grill to tourists for 50 euros. More interesting info on Cesar Manrique's work -- who sometimes integrated volcanic formations in his designs.